


borne back ceaselessly

by gdgdbaby



Category: Attack the Block (2011)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Pre-Canon, Slice of Life, Yuletide 2014, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-02-27 21:32:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2707538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gdgdbaby/pseuds/gdgdbaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She says she wishes I hung out with a better crowd," Simon admits, fiddling with the tassel on his jacket.</p><p>"There is no better crowd," Pest insists.</p><p>Simon looks up through his flopping fringe and grins. "That's what I told her."</p>
            </blockquote>





	borne back ceaselessly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Etnoe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etnoe/gifts).



> five indiscriminate pieces of the past. warnings for mild schoolyard violence, child neglect, and casual drug use, all compliant with canon.

1.

Jerome gets his first pair of glasses in fourth year. In his head, he understands that he needs them. It's gotten so bad that he can barely see the date on the board, even when he's sitting in the front row. But he can't help the worry that creeps over his shoulders and weighs him down, or that typical, overblown primary school fear that one blip in the status quo—like accidentally pissing your pants on stage during the annual school play, or, indeed, being the first person in your year to get glasses—will irrevocably change his place in the world forever.

It doesn't help that his sister amps the anxiety up tenfold with her solemn stories about kids with specs getting the shit teased out of them. "Just watch _Arthur_ and you'll see," she says, the afternoon he comes back with his frames sliding down the bridge of his nose, and doesn't manage to turn her head quick enough for Jerome to miss the wide grin on her face.

"Mum," he yells, crossing his arms over his chest in a tight circle and sinking further into the couch. "Joyce is being mean."

His mother pokes her head into the sitting room, sends them both shrewd looks. "A lot of people wear glasses, dear. Don't worry about it. And don't bully your brother, Joyce."

"Yes, mum," she says, contrite as can be, but when Mum's gone back into the kitchen Joyce waggles her eyebrows meaningfully. _Four-eyes_ , she mouths.

Jerome grabs the strap of his backpack and bangs into his bedroom without a backward glance. Once through the door, he chucks his new glasses across the room, the most dramatic gesture he can think of. He can hear Joyce tittering outside, over the sound of _Wallace and Gromit_ playing on the telly. After a long moment of desperate blinking, he trips over three mounds of dirty laundry and reaches blindly down to scoop his glasses off the floor. Sets them firmly on his face. There's science homework to be done.

 

"Nice frames," says Simon, later that night, when he comes up to play FIFA.

"You think the kids at school will get on me about them?" Jerome asks abruptly, staring hard at the telly and mashing a vicious thumb into his controller.

Simon glances at him for a minute—during which Jerome scores on him, ole!—before turning back to the screen. On the CGI pitch, Klose does a backflip. "If they cross you, I'll just punch 'em in the face, yeah? Not a big deal," he says, with all the enthusiasm of someone who's never actually been in a fight in his entire life.

Jerome supposes it’s the thought that counts. Even if Simon's the smallest, skinniest third year he's ever seen. The wind could probably blow him over. Honestly, Jerome should be the one defending him.

 

In the end, he decides a preemptive strike is the best course of action. He walks into maths first thing Monday morning, raps sharply on his desk, and says, "If any of you call me four-eyes, know this: one, it is the most uninventive, plebeian insult you could possibly come up with, and two, I won't help you with homework ever again. So there." Richard, the biggest kid in the class, stares at him from the back like he doesn't even know what _plebeian_ means. Jerome wouldn't be surprised.

The first period bell rings before anyone can respond. Jerome sinks into his chair, collar hot around his neck.

Simon meets up with him at the front gate after school, bag slung low over one shoulder. "How'd it go, bruv?"

Jerome mulls it over. "Good," he replies, and is surprised to find that it's true.

 

 

2.

Moses moves into the block because one day his mom just ups and leaves. Here one day, gone the next, and the next, and the next. The tiny flat in Hackney is empty for months and months before social services finally comes for him. He gets ten minutes to gather his belongings. It would've mattered more if he had anything to pack.

Uncle Adom is his mum's older brother and lives down in the heart of Brixton. Ten-year-old Moses has no real idea what this means until he gets there—but he's long since learned that survival is about picking shit up as fast as you can. Being quick on your feet never hurt anybody, and it's especially helpful here, with Yardies patrolling the streets at night and Ron and his dealers in the penthouse suite. In the block, the world is different. Not better, or worse than anywhere else Moses has been. Just different.

His uncle doesn't talk much, and is around even less. He'll leave Moses some money and disappear for weeks on end—but then, Adom had never asked to be saddled with his sister's brat. Moses gets it. An absentee guardian doesn't matter, anyway. Moses has always been good at taking care of himself. He keeps his head down as best he can at school and at home. All he has to do is keep himself in one piece till he turns eighteen. After that, he'll be able to do anything.

 

A social worker with dirty blond hair and cheap perfume comes around from time to time. _How do you like it?_ she asks, eyes darting around the small flat, nose twitching, like she's a mouse. Like she'd rather be anywhere but here. _Are you settling in well?_

Moses gives her all the right answers. He even manages to hide the limp in his step when he walks her back to the door, the one he'd gotten a couple days ago from an older kid who'd been asking for a fight.

By the time he's eleven, the lady's stopped coming.

 

 

3.

Pest's parents just don't give a fuck, which he guesses is the only noticeable thing he's managed to inherit from them. His dad's some kind of big deal in the oil industry, and the hired help are always saying his mum's the consummate trophy wife, whatever that means, so they don't have time for a kid—and certainly not one like him. A menace, they call him, when they're even around long enough to have the chance. A nuisance. A pest.

So he takes that name and makes it his own. Pest fucks up his parents' first house party when he's seven years old, takes plates of food and tips them over the balcony into the garden. Two birds with one stone, see: the appetizers and the roses, ruined.

"You think you're so smart, you little shit," his dad roars, the thick veins in his neck bulging out, and Pest nods along. He's pleased. For the first time in a very long time, his father is _looking at him_.

The straw that breaks the camel's back comes when Pest is nine, and he gets into a fistfight with the left back of the school's football team. There was a reason. There always is. But he can't remember what it was anymore—just that the look on his mum's face when she comes to collect him is stone cold. So detached Pest wonders, briefly, if they're even on the same planet anymore.

"We're sending you to your nan's." The unspoken _good riddance_ rings through loud and clear.

It's not quite a death sentence, but it could be. He doesn't throw a tantrum—the pregnant silence makes them pay him more attention than anything Pest could have screamed. The last he sees of them are their pale faces at the train station, through the glass of the windows, sterile and serene.

 

His nan's going soft and gray at the edges, and is everything his parents are not. She lives in a tiny flat in Lambeth, an old lady spending her days in one of the shittiest boroughs of London. (When Pest is older, he'll wonder what kind of son would let his ailing mother live in a place like this. Then he remembers what his dad is like, with his evening parties and fine wines and utter disregard for anything that isn't work, and stops wondering.)

Pest's cheeky and brash and rude as hell, but he's not _stupid_ , and he doesn't like Nan to worry. She's old. For all his conniving ways, he doesn't want to give her a heart attack before her time—so when he gets into deep shit, he forges her signature. The best private school in the district is dull as fuck and Pest gets kicked out after seventh year, busted for getting blazed in the bathroom one too many times. The situation's too big for him to hide because Nan actually has to see the administrators in person.

She makes the best of it, though. Talks about sending him to the school two streets down where most of the kids in the block go. "It's convenient," she says, smiling up at him, eyes glazed and watery. "Closer to home."

"'Course, Nan."

 

First day of term finds him swallowed in a uniform three sizes too big. There's a ten-pound note tucked into his pocket for some school-issue fish and chips, or whatever. In the cafeteria, year eight's students clump together in groups. Pest's new, so he's got no one—no one except the smug idiots swaggering around like they own the place, the ones that accost him right before they're let out for lunch after an hour of maths.

"Fuck off," he snaps, pushing back with relish when one of them shoves at his shoulder.

"Seems to me like you've got money for food, yeah?" the biggest one says.

"What's it to you?"

"Give it to me," he replies, baring his teeth. It's the worst middle school cliché in the entire world, but Pest guesses that melodramatic shit they're always showing on the telly has to come from somewhere.

"Are you serious?"

The git folds his arm over his chest. Clicks his teeth, as if he's some kind of big man. "You deaf, new kid?"

Pest licks his lips. "You want my ten fucking quid?" He hops up onto the balls of his feet, a reckless grin spreading across his face. "Then fucking fight me for it," he goads, and dodges the first fist that comes flying through the air.

The guys keep coming at him, even after he's dealt with two, three, four of them. Pest's a skinny fucker, and small for his age, so people always underestimate how hard he hits—and he's fast to boot (has to be, as central midfield and occasional forward), fancy footwork dancing circles around them. But a stray fist catches him in the ribs and he doubles over, breath rattling in his chest, and then they're pummeling his back, ripping at the collar of his uniform. If Pest had any room left for belief in authority, he'd be asking where the fuck the teachers were.

Reprieve arrives in the form of his desk mate from maths, whose mere presence seems to inspire fear and awe, even though the leader of the group is probably twice as big as he is. They beat a hasty retreat, gone as fast as they'd appeared. Pest tongues his split lip and slides down against the wall, wheezing.

The other kid bends over him, an unreadable expression on his face.

Pest eyes him warily. "You gonna take my money?"

"No."

"Got your own?"

"No."

"Say anything besides _no_?"

The guy pretends to consider it, and Pest's attempt at a laugh turns into a cough, arcs of pain burning across his abdomen. "You okay?"

"I've had much worse, bruv. Believe it."

Pest staggers upright again. The guy stares at him for another beat before sticking his hand out. "I'm Moses."

The handshake is warm and firm. "Pest."

Moses raises his eyebrows. "That your real name?" Of course he knows it isn't, having been there for roll call in goddamn maths. But he asks the question anyway, slow and measured. Like it's important to him.

"Does it matter?" Pest asks flatly.

Moses smiles a little, the slow upward curve of his mouth smoothing out the tense lines of his face. "No."

 

 

4.

Dennis only starts regularly going to the youth club down the street because the shit he's interested in—there's a week they spend on model rockets, and another on Japanese anime—happens to conveniently coincide with his dad's weekly drinking binges. He's learned to avoid the old man on the days when he's worse. It works out pretty well for him: six-a-side football (and fencing, occasionally) on Saturday afternoons instead of the odd beer bottle aimed at his head. Win-win situation.

 _Proper education_ is another story. The school counselors seem to think Mum leaving when he's six has something to do with his skiving off. It's a cute theory, but he really doesn't remember much of her apart from the yelling matches she used to have with Dad. The truth is—Dennis can't keep still long enough to learn. And the things they want to teach him at school (maths, English, non-explosive chemistry) don't have anything to do with what he likes. They certainly don't help him survive on the streets. The administration's got enough shit to deal with in the petty crime problem alone. Suits should be thanking Dennis for taking himself off their hands.

So—instead of eight hours of rubbish five days a week, he gets a job at the Pizza GoGo two streets down working their delivery bike. For one, he gets free lunch. For two, the tips pay well enough to get him the set of samurai swords he wants for his birthday when he's twelve. Ted, the owner, doesn't give a fuck that Dennis is underage. He also doesn't give a fuck whatever Dennis does with the bike on his off hours, so long as the pizzas get delivered on time—so he drives around on the weekends with Dionne from next door, or Pogo in the back, after the old man buys Dennis the puppy one Christmas. Because the holidays make him feel guilty for being a shit dad, or something.

 

There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other. Dennis read that in a Harry Potter book, once, before they started getting way too long for his taste. It's a nice thought, but he doesn't think anything like that will ever happen to him—at least, not until Sammy and his gang swing by the youth centre's gym after basketball night.

It goes like this: Tia Biggs is waiting on the side of the road outside the entrance of the youth club with her little cousin Simon. Spells trouble right off the bat, because Sammy's been mooning over Tia since forever and Simon's got a protective streak ten kilometers long. Dennis's seen the kid in action. The problem here is that Sammy's, what, eighteen years old? Something like that, and Simon's about half his size. Tia's strong, but not that strong, and definitely not when the other boys from Elsby are blocking her way.

Sammy is spitting out insult after insult and wailing on Simon in the middle of a ring of his goons. Before Dennis really knows what he's doing, he's jumping into the fray. Pulls Sammy off and punches him straight in the nose, ducks a stray fist and sweeps out with his leg. He isn't able to get the switchblade out of his second pair of trousers in time to block the hits off before they begin landing on him in earnest—but a minute later, Moses from 191 and some other kid from a couple of floors up shove in, and Tia manages to break through the human barricade, runs up and sends a vicious kick right into Sammy's gut.

"No means no, you fuck," she hisses, punctuating every word with another kick. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a couple bulky kids chase Simon around the corner—but a bony hand's twisting his shirt and he can't follow.

Kick and punch and elbow and a sharp jab to someone's solar plexus—they'd done units at the youth club on martial arts and anatomy some time last August and now Dennis knows right where to hit so it'll _hurt_ —and then it's over, copper left on Dennis's tongue, three of his knuckles split. Sammy slinks away with a broken wrist and bruised ego, cradling his left side. The other Elsby boys moan into the pavement for a bit before they finally piss off, too.

"Did anyone call the feds?" Moses calls out. No one answers but the crickets chirping from the trees. He pulls his hood in tighter and nods. "Good. Let's keep it that way."

Dionne wades through the subsiding hubbub to get to Dennis, reaches out and brushes a finger across the scrape on his cheek. He hisses, flinching away. Tia appears at Dionne's shoulder a minute later, an unfamiliar light in her eyes. Much later, he'll recognize it as gratitude. "Thanks, Den," she says, biting her lip. "You didn't have to do that."

He lifts a shoulder. "You know I'm always looking a good fight." Dionne rolls her eyes. "Really, it weren't nothing. Everyone in the block knows what Sammy's like. Just gave him a target his own size is all."

"No, man," someone says from behind him, arms akimbo as he gestures wildly. It's the skinny kid, Moses' friend, who turns out to be the Pest that's been leaving graffiti everywhere. "You're a right hero! We all are. _No one_ fucks with the block."

"Don't build up," Dennis says, but he can't help the grin that stretches out over his face. Even though his ribs are aching, and his dad's definitely going to ask about the bloody cut beneath his left eye in the morning.

 

They find Simon hiding out in one of the bins behind the block. Moses pulls him out and brushes him off. "You need to stop getting yourself into these situations, bruv," Jerome says, tonguing his split lip.

"You're the one who beat up two guys," Simon points out, still a little breathless from hightailing it earlier.

"Three," Pest corrects, jabbing an elbow into Jerome's side. "Prettied Jared's face right up at the end there, didn't you, fam?"

Jerome blinks, stares down at his bruised fingers. "Yeah," he says. "I guess I did."

"Always knew you had it in you," Simon announces. He sounds impressed. Jerome throws an arm over his shoulders and smiles.

"Don't make a habit of this, boys," Tia warns. She gives her cousin a significant look that he ignores. Moses shakes his head. Pest cackles. Dennis glances sideways and raises his eyebrows—he's known Pest for all of an hour and he's already sure the shine in his eyes can only mean he'll be doing the exact opposite.

Dennis is pretty okay with that.

 

 

5.

They all live off pizza for a while, because, against all reason, Ted likes them enough to give them discounts because they're friends with his best delivery guy. Jerome always gets the same thing—plain cheese—and uses a proper fork and knife, eats daintily like he's having afternoon tea. Moses and Simon usually share a pepperoni. Pest and Dennis split the Meat Lovers' because it gets you more topping for your money, and Pest is as anti-vegetable as they come.

The nickname idea comes about because Simon wants Pest to teach him how to graffiti but doesn't actually want his name attached. "My mum walks by the wall all the time, on the way back home from work," Simon points out. "She'd see it for sure. And even if she didn't, Simon's so _boring_. I need a better tag."

Pest leans back in his chair and chews thoughtfully on his crust. "You can come up with a—what's it called, Jerome? Like Banksy?"

"A pseudonym," Jerome supplies.

"I guess," Simon says, dubious. "But I don't want it to be unrecognizable, either."

"You could use your last name," Pest offers. "It's pretty common."

"Biggs?"

"It'd look really cool if you changed the 's' to a 'z', fam," Dennis says, getting into it. "And if we walk around calling you Biggz, people would know who you were. Sick nickname."

Simon brightens. "Alright. What about you, Jerome?"

" _Jerome_ —it's already got a sort of sophisticated ring, innit?" Pest says, shrugging. "One of us has to be smart about things."

Jerome adjusts his glasses and looks pleased, then worried. "Um. Spray paint washes off, right?"

Moses chuckles around a mouthful of pizza. "You worry too much, man."

"One of us has to," Jerome echoes, the corner of his mouth rising.

"I'll be Young Den," Dennis cuts in decisively.

Pest raises his eyebrows. "As opposed to what, huh? Old Den?" Dennis smacks his arm hard enough to sting, and Pest recoils into the couch. "Okay, okay. I'm Pest, obviously. And Moses is Moses, because it's badass enough. Like from Exodus. Parting the Red Sea and shit."

"What Red Sea?" Dennis demands.

"Fam, you don't even know your Bible?"

 

In retrospect, it's useless. Simon's mum knows exactly who his friends are, and when she sees the graffiti up on the wall he gets a stern talking-to and no Xbox for the rest of the month. He's glum for about a day before Moses points out they've been immortalized on brick— _sorry, Jerome, graffiti like that ain't coming off any time soon_ —and that his mum can't really do anything about it. Not even with a steam cleaner.

"She says she wishes I hung out with a better crowd," Simon admits, fiddling with the tassel on his jacket.

"There is no better crowd," Pest insists.

Simon looks up through his flopping fringe and grins. "That's what I told her."

 

Ninth year, Den's cousin Femi talks Pest into joining the school's proper football team instead of just fucking about with a flat ball after hours. This, of course, means he has to start getting better marks if he wants to play, which is a hassle until he remembers Jerome is actually good at this shit. Fam won't help Pest outright cheat, but there's a definite uptick in his scores for maths and chemistry the following term. It makes Nan pleased, at least.

Pest is first reserve forward until Billy breaks his leg a week before the big match against Elsby—and then he plays all ninety minutes under the torrential April downpour, assists the equalizer and scores the winning goal. He's subsequently buried under a mound of sweaty players at the end of the match, mud sticky against his front and rain dripping into his eyes so that they burn a little under the stadium's bright lights. When he comes up out of the dogpile, Den and Biggz are cheering like crazy. Jerome's got his arm propped up on Moses' shoulder, waving from the stands. In Moses' arms, steaming beneath an umbrella, he can see the big Pizza GoGo logo. When Pest inhales, he can almost smell the cheese in the air, floating over the wet grass.


End file.
